1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to systems and methods for monitoring medication compliance, and, more particularly, to such systems and methods that utilize an electronic device.
2. Description of Related Art
Non-compliance of patients to drug regimens prescribed by physicians is known to result in a multiplicity of problems, including negative patient outcomes, higher healthcare costs, and increased chance of the spread of communicable diseases. Compliance monitoring is critical in, for example, pharmaceutical clinical trials, geriatrics, and mental health/addiction medicine.
A traditional method of increasing compliance is direct observance, but this is obviously difficult to administer and impractical on a large scale. Other techniques include blood sampling, urine sampling, biological marker detection, self-reporting, pill counting, electronic monitoring, and prescription record review. These techniques are either invasive or prone to tampering.
Therefore, it would be beneficial to provide a device, system, and method for non-invasively monitoring drug compliance.
In vivo biotelemetry and monitoring is known to be used for monitoring embedded oxygen, sensing glucose levels, fetal monitoring, and hormone measuring. Radio-frequency identification (RFID) techniques can be adapted to provide biotelemetry by including external sensors into existing commercial systems. However, RFID was not designed to operate in vivo, and the transmission of electromagnetic signals from embedded or internal sensors can be hampered by attenuation in living tissue.